Reality TV, gossip, and empathy

[phantom power]

Proposing a connection between suburban sprawl, a deficiency in gossip, and declining empathy:

The way I always put it when bullshitting with friends is that tabloids and reality TV have replaced gossip. People are so isolated in their little suburban cells and while they may have connections, their connections may not be connected to each other, which makes it impossible to really conduct a satisfying round of gossip. You really do need a group of people who all know each other. Tabloid celebrities fill this need. They create a false "community" that we can dish about over the water cooler, since we all know the general characters. Or even if we don't, we know where they come from, so it gives you that sense of familiarity gossip requires to work.

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I would argue that gossip is one of the primary ways that human beings communicate social values. Living in a gossip-heavy community, I would rank gossip as a values-transmitter far above religious teachings, the admonishments of community leaders, and other forms of moral education like books and whatnot. Gossip seems up there with parental influence in terms of shaping values---at least if you have a steady stream of gossip. (And parents use gossip to impart values.)

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I honestly do think the spread of suburban isolation has done major damage to our national ability to feel empathy, in part because the chains of communication that keep empathy alive have broken down. Which is why I was unsurprised to see, at the debate, Tea Partiers cheer wildly at the idea of letting the uninsured just die. Despite all the "country boy" preening, the Tea Party is really a product of the suburbs, and the way they breed limited, non-inter-connected social circles. (I suppose cities can, too, and yet in the two I've lived in, I would often exist in an urban tribe, usually formed around common interests---you have enough people on hand to do that, and the travel time to see friends was significantly lower than it was in the suburbs, for the brief period I lived there.) When most of your understanding of how other people are and live comes not from person-to-person interaction or from the gossip mill, but from tabloids and reality TV, your ability to feel empathy for others really recedes. I think this goes a long way towards explaining how anti-choicers are getting more severe in their judgments of the sexually active, as well. They think of a "woman who has sex" as being Snooki, and completely forget that actually, "sexually active" describes moms and church ladies and working professionals and neighbors. That's because those women's sex and romantic lives are completely invisible to them. As weird as it is to say that gossiping about other people's sex lives can actually make you more sympathetic to their health needs, I think there's a lot of truth to that. When the person who has an STD is someone you know, it's much easier to feel that person deserves treatment, because hey, despite their flaws you like them and don't want them to suffer. When the pregnant teenage girl is your neighbor's daughter, that's easy to relate to, and you can feel their need to have readily available abortion services.

But if the majority of your exposure to other people's sex lives is a bunch of reality TV stars having one night stands, you're probably not exercising your empathy muscles. And as we all know, if you don't use it, you lose it.

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[OneGrassRoot]

1. Interesting. Thanks for sharing. :) n/t